The acceptable, official story is that Africa is coping just fine. The unofficial story – the one whispered between disappearing villages and vanishing rivers – is that the lay of the land is shifting. Lakes are shrinking, storms misfiring, and whole communities migrating as if following instructions someone else signed. This is the climate truth they hide beneath pledges and podiums where Africa is placed at the frontline; not because it is vulnerable, but because she is inconvenient to the world’s conscience. In the official story, Africa is a victim of geography, used for dramatic emphasis by the same global system that disproportionately harms her.

When the Ground Moves Before the People Do

There is a quiet, bitter humor that Africans have perfected in the presence of disaster. It is the humor of people who watch the earth shift beneath their feet and then hear news told by those in the comfortable distance of Nairobi or New York, that they are “resilient.” But nothing strips the myth faster than the moment a hillside collapses before dawn and buries a village that has existed longer than the nation-state itself.

Earlier in November this year, a small Kenyan village called Elgeyo Marakwet joined the map of the recently wounded. News sites declared it the way they always do: Fresh landslide kills two.

Fresh, as though the earth is a bakery.

Fresh, as though death is restocked every morning.

Fresh, as though yesterday’s landslide has already expired and a new one is needed to keep the country attentive.

Minutes later, the government arrived in the story with its usual ceremonial function: confirming the number of children who did not make it. Not mitigating, not warning, not preventing. Confirming. A word that belongs in stamp pads and registers, not in the soft, unfinished lives of schoolchildren taken by mud.

But this is the choreography of climate disaster in Africa.

The ground moves.

The news reports.

The government confirms.

And life, for those who survive, is expected to return to normal within the hour.

The Slow Undoing of Home

Climate migration is often described as a choice. A decision. A rational response to environmental pressure. But anyone who has watched families in Isiolo, Karamoja, Jonglei, or Gutu pack up their entire existence into sacks knows that “choice” is the wrong word. It suggests options. It suggests agency. It suggests a marketplace where one can select a better future with the same care they select grain.

A grandmother in Kapenguria once tried to make sense of it.

“We are not moving to the next village. We are moving to the next version of ourselves.”

Her daughter, tying a pot with sisal string, replied,

“And do you think the next version will [have something to] eat?”

These are not migrants. They are people fleeing the slow violence of climate collapse. Lives collapsing as quietly as topsoil carried off by a wind that comes and goes much like our collective memory. And yet, in every glossy climate report, these same families appear as “mobile populations,” their grief shaved down into graphs, their losses translated into palatable numbers that fit neatly inside PowerPoint templates.

Human beings turned into data points because data does not weep. It does not ask why the global north cannot meet its own promises. It does not care who dies so that someone else may continue burning oil. 

When Help Arrives

NGOs will always arrive. That is their mission statement. But the gap between presence and impact is often wide enough to swallow whole communities.

They come with frameworks that have already been approved in Geneva or Washington. They come with vocabulary polished until it glows: adaptive capacity, sustainable livelihoods, community resilience. Words that sound full but are often delivered to people who have eaten nothing but bitter roots and water for three days.

Still, to dismiss these actors is to misunderstand the crisis entirely. The problem is machinery. Aid runs on models that cannot keep pace with a world where climate disasters now bloom faster than budgets can be revised. Organizations are not indifferent; they are overwhelmed. They stretch, they patch, they improvise. They respond to fire with teaspoons because those are the only tools they are allowed to carry.

And yet, buried beneath every strategy document is the unspoken admission:

Africa is not losing because it is unprepared.

Africa is losing because the pace of disaster has outrun the speed of help.

The Question That Governs Every Border

There is a question which stalks every migration caravan on every route from the Sahel to the Zambezi. A question whispered in the dark before families decide if dawn will find them in the same place.

Who gets to survive?

It is a frightening question because the answers are not philosophical. They are political, geographic, and economic. In a just world, survival would correspond to vulnerability. The least responsible would endure the longest. Instead, survival maps perfectly onto wealth.

If emissions decided fate, Africa would outlive everyone.

If historical responsibility mattered, reparations would not be a negotiation.

If only justice governed policy, climate finance would be disbursed with the urgency of oxygen. In its place, the continent that warmed the world the least is the first to starve, drown, burn, or be buried alive beneath soil that can no longer hold itself together.

Satire in a Season of Loss

It is absurd, almost comically so, how tragedy here must coexist with performance.

Government officials hold press conferences standing next to cracked riverbeds.

Corporations plant trees with one hand and drill with the other.

Influential leaders fly to climate summits in chartered jets, then speak passionately about emissions reduction. So we laugh.

Laugh, because the alternative is despair.

Laugh, because irony is cheaper than therapy.

We laugh because, like the headline about the landslide in Elgeyo Marakwet, tragedy now comes wrapped in the familiar language of routine.

Even shadows are now monetised. Carbon markets have found a way to place a price tag on air and grief, to package sorrow into offset credits sold to those who would prefer not to change.

When Even the Earth’s Old Rituals Begin to Shrink

Another migration unfolding across the continent is quieter than the caravans leaving Isiolo and less documented than the families walking out of Gutu. It is the slow thinning of the Great Wildebeest Migration, that ancient ceremony of movement which once shook the Serengeti like a living being.

For years, scientists whispered warnings. Local migrations in Kenya disappeared entirely. Long-term surveys from the early 2000s showed herds collapsing, corridors pinched into narrow, dying paths. But no one listened because the headline numbers sounded mythic: more than a million wildebeest, the brochures insisted, as if abundance were a permanent fact.

Then the counts began to sober up.

A 2021 field estimate quietly revised the figures downward to about 200,000. A fraction pretending to be a whole. This year, published satellite-guided AI estimates suggested the real numbers might be even lower, more than halving the widely repeated million-plus myth. The world shrugged; tourists continued booking. The illusion of plenty is an excellent marketing tool.

But the Great Migration is not merely a spectacle for visitors. It is a breathing engine:  hooves pruning grasslands, predators following, soils regenerating. The collapse of that engine is the ecological equivalent of a heart learning to beat irregularly.

Picture the same migration in the next 20 years. The brochures will have a tough time referring to a herd resembling a polite queue as “great.” A single dusty ribbon of twelve hundred animals trudges across a plain that once thundered. Lodges maintain schedules because hope is a business model. Drones hover, filming absence from above. Tourists arrive expecting a roar and leave with a whimper, checking the experience off like a museum visit to an already extinct exhibition.

This iconic pulse of East Africa may soon be introduced to schoolchildren as literal history – a parable of abundance told by a continent forced to remember what it can no longer witness.

When even the wild animals begin to fade, only a fool would be ignorant to the fact that the land is speaking in a language clearer than any climate report.

A Continent Walking Into Its Next Shape

As we embark on what I’ll call the last harvest, the stark realization that Africa is expected to endure more than she caused is evident. An acknowledgement that climate migration is not opportunity but erasure.

Comprehension that suffering continues not because it is inevitable, but because global decisions make it profitable.

And yet – Africa walks.

She walks with memory tucked under the arm.

She walks with sorrow carried like a contraband object across borders designed to exclude and extract.

She walks with dignity that refuses to die even when the earth collapses under schoolchildren in the night.

But see, the future will not wait for policy.

The storms will not pause for summit communiques.

The rivers will not negotiate before they rise.

Africa will move because she must.

And perhaps, in the movement, she will discover what the world has refused to give; a terrain where survival is not a luxury.

Until then, the ground will continue to shift. The headlines refreshed, like baked goods. Governments will confirm. Families will bury. And climate justice will remain a promise yet to find its way home.